The invention relates to a system for recording machine jam histories and diagnosing reproduction machines such as copiers and printers, and more particularly, to recording and displaying actual machine jam and machine jam prediction information for such reproduction machines.
As reproduction machines such as copiers and printers become more complex and versatile in the jobs they can do, the interface between the machine and the service rep must necessarily be expanded if full and efficient trouble shooting of the machine is to be realized. A suitable interface must not only provide the controls, displays and messages necessary to monitor and maintain the machine, but must do so in an efficient, relatively simple, and straightforward way.
For example, diagnostic methods involving problems with paper movement usually require that a service rep perform a trend analysis of the problem. This trend analysis is used to determine whether the problem has suddenly appeared, indicating a hard or intermittent failure of a component such as a sensor or driver, or whether the problem has gradually appeared, indicating a wear out type of failure. This analysis is important because some number of paper movement faults are normal and may masks the gradual appearance of wear out related problems. Historically, this analysis has been dependent upon the service rep recording fault histories manually in a machine service log on each service call. The trend analysis consists of the service rep manually reviewing the fault history information recorded in the machine service log for the last several service visits. This method has proven to be time consuming and error prone due to the number of faults.
It is a feature of the present invention to overcome various of the above and other related problems and to thereby make easier, and encourage, the utilization of the full diagnostic capabilities of a modern copying apparatus.
Various diagnostic techniques are known in the prior art. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,711,560 discloses a copier which functions according to a sequence control program stored on floppy disk which can also contain a diagnostic program to facilitate maintenance. U.S. Pat. No. 4,742,483 discloses a laser printer including a microprocessor to read data or program information from a cartridge loaded by a user. A special maintenance operating system on the cartridge runs the printer through automatic routines to be checked by a technician.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,586,147 to Tadokoro discloses a history information providing device for a printer including a memory for storing the latest failure information of the machine such as the number of times of paper jams. This history information is classified as follows: failure information, for example, paper jams, or maintenance information, for example, worn condition.
A difficulty with the prior art methods as noted above, is that they are often error prone and time consuming. An object of the present invention, therefore, is to provide a diagnostic technique for automatically recording and displaying actual machine jam and jam prediction information. Further advantages of the present invention will become apparent as the following description proceeds, and the features characterizing the invention will be pointed out with particularity in the claims annexed to and forming a part of this specification.